THERE WILL BE BLOOD

"I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!!!"

I proclaim There Will Be Blood as The Best Movie of 2007 That I Didn't See Until 2008. If I had managed to squeeze in a screening of this flick before the calendar flipped to 2008 and I whittled down my faves for the year, it would have definitely re-shaped my Top Ten List, and probably my top two or three.

There Will Be Blood is like a strange novel, but by that I don't believe it even remotely resembles Upton Sinclair's book Oil! (from which PT Anderson got his inspiration). It is a uniquely American tale of the struggle between a ruthless capitalist and a deluded false prophet, and it is entirely The Daniel Day-Lewis Show. Day-Lewis is one of moviedom's best and most notable chameleons (try to make sense that this is the same actor who played prissy Cecil in A Room With a View, or the disabled Christy Brown in My Left Foot). His oily oilman Daniel Plainview is a piece of work, with his smirk hiding behind a busy moustache, and a glint in his eyes that can seem falsely warm or curious, or worse, glintingly mad.

We are introduced to Plainview in an amazing wordless 15-minute opening to the film. Working alone in a barren Western landscape, Plainview crawls down a ladder into a deep hole of darkness, hammering at stone, looking for silver. But after trial and error, it turns out that he has found a mother lode of another sort: oil. With its gorgeous cinematography and horror-movie score, this opening sequence fills the viewer with inexplicable dread. After all, the mood could have been completely different, a celebration perhaps, but the music of Johnny Greenwood (of the band Radiohead) and director Anderson sets the tone early that this is not a feel-good movie.

Plainview becomes a savvy oilman, taking his cute young son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) with him as his "business partner" as he works transactions or woos people out of their land claims. A young man by the name of Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) comes to him one day to sell information. He knows of some land where the oil basically sits on top of the dirt. In fact, it is his family's farm, and he'll give Plainview more information for a price. A handshake and exchange of money later, Plainview is in Little Boston, California, dealing with the Sunday family, and the Sunday son Eli (also Dano), who looks eerily like Paul, but seemingly without the recognition, and with a trait of being a religious zealot and the town's fiery preacher. As Plainview transforms Little Boston from desolate farmlands to rich oil fields (at least for him), preacher Eli Sunday becomes both his worst enemy and his most convenient ally.

There Will Be Blood runs well over two hours, but I was never bored. The film takes place from 1898 to 1929 when the U.S. first starts to slip into the Depression, and the look of the film is dusty brown and black, highlighted by searing sky and flaming oil derricks. I remember seeing a tepid, odd trailer for the film, and thinking, "So what?" But after seeing the film, I can only imagine how impossible it was to market. There Will Be Blood is a stirring, jarring, and disturbing mood piece that takes patience, like an epic novel. But all the way through the now famous ending of the movie, I was absolutely enthralled. 

  DVD NOTES  

The DVD extras are perfect for a film like this. Rather than breaking the spell of the film (which very often is the case when you immediately watch happy-go-lucky actor interviews with people who just played serial killers), the DVD instead sticks to the facts. A 26-minute black-and-white silent film (circa 1920s) called The Story of Petroleum, plus a 15-minute montage of old photos and movie reels from the early 20th century oil era show just how painstakingly the filmmakers reproduced the look of the era. There are also a couple trailers, two extra scenes, and a curious outtake called "Dailies Gone Wild" which is just the restaurant scene with Daniel Day-Lewis slightly slipping out of character at the end.